Trevor Ravenscroft

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Trevor Ravenscroft (born 1921 ; died 1989 ) was a British writer and writer of The Spear of Destiny , German under the titles "The Spear of Destiny" and "The Holy Lance", on the occult background of National Socialism . The work, characterized by esoteric and anthroposophical ideas, was a bestseller at the time and has been translated into several languages. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke called Spear of Destiny as the most influential book on "Nazi mysteries" ( Nazi Mysteries ) in the English-speaking world.

Life

Ravenscroft trained at Repton and the Sandhurst Military Academy , after which he served with the Royal Scots Fusiliers . During the Second World War he was captured by a commando in North Africa in 1941 and was released in 1945 (after several unsuccessful attempts to escape). After the war he did medical training. He then became a journalist at Beaverbrook and the International Publishing Corporation .

At times Ravenscroft then seems to have lived in materially difficult circumstances, which only changed with the success of The Spear of Destiny . According to his publisher Neville Armstrong, Ravenscroft is also said to have been difficult as an author.

The spear of doom

Ravenscroft became known through the 1972 bestseller The Spear of Destiny (German as "The Spear of Destiny" and "The Holy Lance"), in which he combined the legend of the Spear of Destiny with alleged occult roots of National Socialism . He named the Austrian anthroposophist Walter Johannes Stein as the source of this construct .

Before he emigrated to England in 1932, Stein was a teacher at a Waldorf school and was on the board of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. He had written a book about the legend of the Grail, in which he advocated the theory that Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival was a kind of medieval key novel, behind whose figures Stein believed he could recognize historical figures from the 9th century. In particular, he identified the magician Klingsor from the Parzival with Landulf II , a prince of Capua and villain figure in the Lombard history of Erchempert .

Ravenscroft describes how he read Stein's book in 1947 and got the impression that this work was not simply due to the usual methods of historical research, but “that his book was written with the help of special transcendental abilities of the same kind as Wolfram von Eschenbach attributed it to his famous story of the Grail, the Parzival. ”He describes in detail a first visit to Stein and states that in the years that followed, up to Stein's death in 1957, he was closely connected and a frequent guest at Stein's house in Kensington . Ravenscroft is said to have later admitted that he never met Stein personally, but that he had a media connection with Stein . It remains unclear whether and to what extent Ravenscroft had access to Stein's estate, which was later evaluated by Johannes Tautz and is in the possession of Stein's daughter Clarissa Johanna Muller.

Ravenscrofts now tells a story of the young student Stein who in 1912 found a copy of Parzival in a Viennese antiquarian bookstore that was full of great occult notes by a certain Adolf Hitler and how Stein then, with the help of the antiquarian Ernst Pretzsche, found this Hitler . The story seems rather implausible due to its novel-like form and is otherwise completely unproven.

The eponymous Spear of Fate , also known as the Holy Lance , is a Christian relic , namely the spear that was thrust into Christ's side at the crucifixion . According to Ravenscroft, the history of the spear went back much further: allegedly forged by the "prophet" Phineas, by which Pinchas the zealot is probably meant, the lance is said to have been in the possession of Joshua , who held it in his hand when he gave the order to There was a storm on Jericho , then hurled from Saul at the young David , and finally came upon King Herod . As is often the case with relics, which should be unique by their nature, this lance is also available in at least three copies.

One of these copies has been in the possession of the Roman-German emperors since the 10th century , has been held in high honor since the time of the Ottonians and was one of the so-called imperial regalia that were kept in Nuremberg for a long time . In 1912 the Holy Lance was in the possession of the Habsburgs and was kept in the treasury of the Vienna Hofburg . After the annexation of Austria, Hitler had the lance brought to Nuremberg along with the other imperial insignia; after 1945 it came into temporary possession of the USA, was returned in 1946 and brought back to Vienna. The crucial point is that, according to legend, the Holy Lance makes its owner invincible, as evidenced by the victory over the Hungarians in the battle on the Lechfeld , in which it was carried. Later owners then apparently did not know how to make proper use of the powerful relic, as the history of the Habsburgs, which was not always characterized by military successes, speaks for this. In Stein's book about the Grail legend, the dispute between the Grail Castle Munsalvaesche and Klingsor's Schastelmarveile Castle , which stands for the forces of good and evil or Christianity vs. Black magic, interpreted as a struggle for possession of the Holy Lance.

According to Ravenscroft's report, the young Hitler was fascinated by the lance and its legend. Ravenscroft assumes that Hitler, who was temporarily homeless in Vienna at the time, was already dreaming of world domination. He is said to have introduced these ambitions to Stein in 1912 and 1913, and he pursued his occult studies to promote them. Ravenscroft is said to have belonged to the circle around the ariosophist Guido von List in Vienna, together with the unproven antiquarian Pretzsche . List had to flee Vienna in 1909 in order not to be lynched by the Catholic population after the press published the activities of a lodge he led, whose rituals included sexual perversions and medieval black magic.

The story then follows Hitler to Munich, where the future Führer has found competent instructions on the way to occult knowledge. Ravenscroft mentions in particular Dietrich Eckart , Karl Haushofer , Friedrich Hielscher and the circle of the Thule Society . Part of the initiatory rituals carried out in this context were numerous human sacrifices, the form of which Ravenscroft refuses to describe, he only says that they were "unspeakably sadistic and hideous". At least he notes that there is no concrete evidence that anything like this even happened. But there is evidence for this not on the material, but on the astral plane . The satanic machinations of Hitler's mentors could not remain hidden from the secret circle of the Grail initiates, as their leader Ravenscroft leads Rudolf Steiner, who is known not only as an anthroposophist but also as an occultist , the technique of astral projection brought everything to light and Steiner was a close confidante of Steiner was, as indirectly to the knowledge of Ravenscroft.

Of the people mentioned, only Eckart had a connection to the Thule Society. Pauwels and Bergier ascribed to the geographer Haushofer occult interests and a membership in the Vril Society . Ravenscroft stylized Haushofer as the “master magician of the Nazi party”. Hielscher, who appears consistently as "Heilscher" at Ravenscroft, actually classified as hostile to the regime in 1933 and imprisoned for his connection to the conspirators of July 20, 1944, is at Ravenscroft "an initiate of even higher rank than Haushofer and he is far more knowledgeable about the secret doctrine superior [...] Heinrich Himmler spoke of him in a whisper, full of deference. “None of this is verifiable.

In 1979 Ravenscroft sued British author James Herbert for copyright infringement. According to Ravenscroft, Herbert's novel The Spear had improperly adopted elements, motifs and formulations from Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny . Herbert refused to pay the £ 25,000 demanded by Ravenscroft. After the court ruled in favor of Ravenscroft, which, however, did not award damages, the offending parts were removed in later editions of the novel. The method of historical research through meditation used by Ravenscroft and allegedly also by Stein, described in the court decision, is remarkable, with the help of which they came to the knowledge of a conventional historiography of inaccessible "facts". Nick Freeman writes in an article on The Spear that it is a unique case in British legal history in which "facts obtained through transcendental meditation" were included in a court decision.

Obviously, we are not talking about transcendental meditation in the present-day sense, but rather about “transcendental awareness”, a term used several times by Ravenscroft to denote a state of expanded consciousness in which memories of past existences and higher spiritual states would become accessible, and which, according to Ravenscroft , can be conveyed in particular through the use of mescaline . And Hitler is also said to have taken mescaline and received the corresponding visions. He had received the reference to the drug and instructions for its use from the antiquarian Pretzsche, the drug himself from “an old friend [Hitler's] named Hans Lodz [...], a herb collector who still had traces of the Germanic tribes in his peasant blood hereditary atavistic clairvoyance ”. Hitler is said to have visited this Hans Lodz on a trip to the Wachau together with Stein . Ravenscroft then describes in astonishing detail Hitler's first drug experience, during which he remembers to have been the aforementioned Landulf von Capua in a previous life , the model of the evil magician Klingsor in Wolfram's epic Parzival and Wagner's opera Parsifal .

Fonts

  • The Spear of Destiny. The occult power behind the spear which pierced the side of Christ. London, Spearman 1972. American edition: Putnam, New York 1973.
    • English: the spear of fate. The symbol for demonic forces from Christ to Hitler. Translated by Gustav Adolf Modersohn. Edition Bergh im Ingse-Verlag, Zug / Switzerland 1974, ISBN 3-430-17634-4 .
    • New edition under the title: The Holy Lance. The occult power of a relic that Hitler wanted to use to conquer the world. HJB, Mühlhausen-Ehingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-937355-87-0 .
  • The Cup of Destiny. The Quest for the Grail. Rider, London 1981.
    • English: The Cup of Fate. The search for the grail. Translated by Clivia Taschner-Refer. Sphinx, Basel 1982, ISBN 3-85914-143-0 . New edition: Heyne, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-453-12596-7 .
  • Edited posthumously by Tim Wallace-Murphy: The Mark of the Beast: The Continuing Story of the Spear of Destiny. Sphere Books, London 1990, ISBN 0-7474-0514-X

literature

  • Alan Baker: Invisible Eagle: The Hidden History of Nazi Occultism. Virgin Books 2000, ISBN 1-85227-863-3 , chapter 5.
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke : Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press, New York 2002, ISBN 0-8147-3124-4 , pp. 118-121.
  • Alec Maclellan: The Secret of the Spear: The Mystery of the Spear of Longinus. Souvenir, London 2004, ISBN 0-285-63696-0 . English: The secret of the holy lance. Kopp, Rottenburg 2005, ISBN 3-938516-10-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun. New York 2002, p. 118.
  2. ^ Reports of Patent, Design and Trade Mark . No. 7, May 8, 1980, p. 196, PDF .
  3. ^ Neville Armstrong: Catching up with the future: a part-autobiography. Sudbury 1999, ISBN 0-9535106-0-3 . See Maclellan: The Secret of the Spear. Rottenburg 2005.
  4. ↑ Walter Johannes Stein: World history in the light of the Holy Grail. Orient-Occident-Verlag, Stuttgart 1928.
  5. ↑ Trevor Ravenscroft: The Spear of Fate. Scherz, 1974, p. 14.
  6. ↑ Trevor Ravenscroft: The Spear of Fate. Scherz, 1974, p. 13 ff.
  7. ↑ Alec Maclellan: The Secret of the Spear. London 2004, p. 116. Maclellan refers here to an article by an "investigative author" named Eric Wynants. Neither the author nor the article could be verified.
  8. ↑ According to Goodrick-Clarke, no such acquaintance between Stein and Hitler is mentioned in Stein's biography of Johannes Tautz , see Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun. New York 2002, p. 324, fn. 36 to chap. 6. See Johannes Tautz: Walter Johannes Stein. A biography. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, Dornach 1989, ISBN 3-7235-0484-1 .
  9. ↑ Trevor Ravenscroft: The Spear of Fate. Scherz, 1974, p. 8.
  10. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. Tauris 2005, ISBN 1-86064-973-4 , p. 223 f.
  11. ↑ Trevor Ravenscroft: The Spear of Fate . Scherz, 1974, p. 179.
  12. ^ Louis Pauwels, Jacques Bergier: Departure into the third millennium: From the future of fantastic reason. Joke 1962.
  13. ↑ Trevor Ravenscroft: The Spear of Fate . Scherz, 1974, p. 231. Cf. Frank Jacob: Die Thule-Gesellschaft. uni-edition, 2010, ISBN 978-3-942171-00-7 , pp. 128-130.
  14. ↑ Trevor Ravenscroft: The Spear of Fate . Scherz, 1974, p. 265. See Kurt M. Lehner: Friedrich Hielscher: Nationalrevolutionär, Resistance, Heideniester. Schöningh, Paderborn 2015, ISBN 978-3-657-78134-8 , p. 189.
  15. ↑ James Herbert: The Spear. New English Library, London 1978. German under the title Blutwaffe. . 5th edition Heyne, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-453-05303-6 .
  16. ↑ Reports of Patent, Design and Trade Mark No. 7, May 8, 1980, pp. 193 ff .. p. 196: During his time as a prisoner of war the plaintiff [= Ravenscroft] had become interested in what has been described to me as supernatural levels of consciousness, which means learning about past facts through meditation. [...] He sought the acquaintance of Dr. Stein, and a close friendship developed between them. Dr. Stein indeed believed that he had the power to recapture lost moments of history by meditation, and he found a ready listener in the plaintiff.
  17. ↑ Nick Freeman: 'A decadent appetite for the lurid' ?: James Herbert, The Spear and 'Nazi Gothic'. In: Gothic Studies. Vol. 8, No. 2, November 2006, pp. 80–97, doi : 10.7227 / GS.8.2.6 , quotation on p. 85: The case is surely the only time in British legal history in which the prosecution has maintained that its actions are founded upon 'facts gained by transcendental meditation' .
  18. ↑ Trevor Ravenscroft: The Spear of Fate . Scherz, 1974, p. 97.
  19. ↑ Trevor Ravenscroft: The Spear of Fate . Scherz, 1974, pp. 95-104.
personal data
SURNAME Ravenscroft, Trevor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1921
DATE OF DEATH 1989